Ramith Hettiarachchi
PhD Student, CMU-Pitt Joint Program in Computational Biology
Website: ramith.fyi
Email: ramith@cmu.edu
Hey! I’m a third year PhD student in the CMU-Pitt Ph.D. Program in Computational Biology, advised by Prof. Lei Li.
Previously at Harvard and MIT, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in computational biology and imaging research under the guidance of Prof. Dushan Wadduwage and Prof. Sergey Ovchinnikov.
I’m interested in developing algorithms and advancing machine learning to learn representations in biology that lead towards drug discovery.
I started this blog when I was learning signals and systems (EN1060) to convey ideas through visualizations. Over the years, it has gone through lots of changes. Occasionally I record piano & vocal covers 🎶🎹. You can find them here.
Experience
- 2025 Jun–2025 Aug: Machine Learning Intern, NEC Labs America
- 2024 Jan–2024 Jul: Visiting Scientist, MIT
- 2022 Jul–2024 Jul: Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, Harvard University
Education
- PhD in Computational Biology: CMU-Pitt PhD Program in Computational Biology - 2029 May (expected).
- BSc in Electronic Engineering: University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
Featured writing
Differentiable evolutionary trees
Our ICML workshop paper, with the paper, poster, code, and related explanation.
Lion Optimizer
An optimizer discovered through evolutionary search.
Inside ESM-2
Evolutionary-scale prediction of protein structure.
An open science journey
Building multilingual AI for Sinhala through a global community effort.
The road to Adam
A visual introduction to Adam and the ideas behind it.